Posts Tagged With: We Live In Public

In New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to Blogging, Kahn & Kellner says,

This is the internet as a living, historical force and one of the keys to understanding and shaping the political and cultural life of the present age.

The Kahn and Kellner piece was written in 2004, however, this quote talks directly into present time where the internet has become a major part of daily life. It is mentioned that the internet is a living historical force, Josh Harris refers to it as, “technology” when he says, “there’s a new boy in town called technology.” How is this relevant? Josh Harris from We Live In Public, masculinizes the internet by referring to it as a ‘boy’ this personifies the internet as being a male. However, the internet is not masculine nor feminine, but a representation of the tech-saavy generation.

In the documentary, We Live In Public, Josh Harris started an experiment called “Pod Hotel” where people were filmed doing everything and anything. One of the citizens said, “it would inspire people to do things they wouldn’t do outside.” In a sense, the Pod Hotel and its surveillance became a disembodiment of societal expectations. Pod Hotel gave its citizens a break from societal rules and judgment to do whatever they wished. Citizens of Quiet saw Pod Hotel as a opportunity for a chance at a new beginning and a escape of the real world.

The above video is an Australian advertisement that plays with the idea of people doing anything they want while alone when no one can judge them. It is similar to the Pod Hotel experiment, where the citizens acclimated and forgot about the surveillance in their environment. However, there are people who are under constant surveillance due to them being celebrities. Jennifer Aniston is one of these celebrities that is often under surveillance and has to combat through rumors all the time.

What better way to poke fun at all the rumors about her than make it all into an advertisement? Many celebrities, like Jennifer Aniston, constantly combat criticisms, rumors, and hordes of paparazzi just to go about their normal routine. While the celebrities gain nationwide news coverage, important feminist politics and resistances would be neglected. We often do not hear about the feminist rallies and picketing that happened that afternoon and will not learn about it until possibly late at night through YouTube. Although we live in a surveillance culture, we do not scrutinize the social media hard enough as we do not know how to protect ourselves from being scrutinized.